Heartland Prize winners also announced

August 02, 2009|By Mark Caro, TRIBUNE REPORTER

Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright of "Angels in America," must make more room on his trophy shelf; he will receive the 2009 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement.

The politically provocative dramatist is being honored for a body of work that includes the two-part, epic "Angels," the much-honored 1992 Broadway sensation that was adapted into a 2003 HBO miniseries that collected 11 Emmy Awards; the Oscar-nominated screenplay to Steven Spielberg's "Munich" (2005); the racially charged musical "Caroline, or Change," which smashed box-office records at Hyde Park's Court Theatre last fall; and a new play, "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures," which debuted this spring at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis with a New York run on the horizon.

"We are delighted and honored to recognize Tony Kushner's extraordinary artistic achievements with this year's Tribune Literary Prize," Tribune editor Gerould Kern said. "Kushner joins a distinguished group to receive this award, including Arthur Miller, Tom Wolfe, August Wilson, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, E.L. Doctorow and David McCullough. Tony Kushner adds a new, vital dimension to that extraordinary list. We greatly appreciate Kushner's brilliance as a playwright. We also honor his contribution to the world through his public, and very passionate, role as a champion of ideas."

Speaking from a car in the Austrian Alps on Thursday, Kushner said he was thrilled to receive the award.

"It's a really wonderful thing and a real honor. I have a long connection to the city. ... I have had nothing but really fantastic experiences in production in Chicago," the native New Yorker said, noting Court's "Caroline" production and the "great launch" of the "Angels" national tour. "I feel like it's like a kind of a second theatrical home in the United States."

He termed receiving a lifetime achievement award at age 53 "a slightly bittersweet thing," but he wasn't complaining.

"I feel very mid-career," he said, "but I'm not going to argue if people feel otherwise. I'm excited about it."

The Tribune also has announced its 2009 Heartland Prize winners.

The fiction award goes to Jayne Anne Phillips' "Lark & Termite," a novel that intertwines the fates of a soldier in the Korean War and a family in West Virginia with a special-needs child. In January, Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller praised the novel as "powerful," with "a prose that sparkles and startles with outside-the-box word choices." The native West Virginia author, Keller wrote in her review, "brews thunder and magic."

Phillips is now an English professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and also spends time in New York and Boston. Last year's Heartland fiction winner was Aleksandar Hemon's "The Lazarus Project."

The recipient of the non-fiction Heartland Prize is Nick Reding's "Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town." Reding, a St. Louis-based journalist, spent four years reporting on how residents of the economically devastated Oelwein, Iowa, (population: 6,126; about 260 miles west of Chicago) became producers and abusers of crystal methamphetamine, described as the world's most dangerous drug.

The book has inspired rave reviews and intense debate since its June release. Reviewing "Methland" for the Tribune, Art Winslow deemed Reding's analysis "encompassing and compelling." Last year's Heartland non-fiction winner was Garry Wills' "Head and Heart: American Christianities."

"Our Heartland Prize-winning books are set in West Virginia and Iowa, but these stories do not focus on bucolic rural life," Kern said. "Rather, they show characters rising up against great forces at work in the world."

Kushner is no stranger to accolades or controversy as the left-leaning, native New Yorker often renders large issues on oversize canvases in works intended to challenge status-quo thinking. The subtitle to "Angels in America" is "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," and it employs intimate drama, broad spectacle, fantastic imagery and black humor while its many characters wrestle with faith, sexuality, mortality and politics in the age of AIDS.

"Homebody/Kabul," which received a major Steppenwolf Theatre production in 2003, uses the story of an English woman who disappears in Afghanistan to examine that country's troubled history with British imperialism, the Soviet invasion, religious fundamentalism and American interventionism. "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide" is a family drama that addresses sexuality, aging, religion and other issues.

"For Tony Kushner, the lessons of history are everything," Tribune theater critic Chris Jones wrote. "His plays reveal motivations, apportion blame. They explain how people came to power, how things got the way they got, why they happened the way they happened."

The prizes will be presented in two separate events Nov. 8 as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. The Literary Prize program honoring Kushner will run from 10 to 11 a.m. at the Symphony Center (220 S. Michigan Ave.), and the Heartland Prizes to Phillips and Reding will be presented from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at Northwestern University School of Law's Thorne Auditorium (375 E. Chicago Ave.).

Tickets are $15 for each event (and free for students and teachers) and go on sale Sept. 8 for Humanities Festival members and Sept. 21 for the general public. You will be able to order them online at chfestival.org or by calling 312-494-9509.